Publicly funded religious schools, or ‘faith schools’, currently make up around a third of our education system. This limits choice for parents who do not want a religious education for their children, or do not share the faith of their local school.

In order to ensure everyone’s right to freedom of religion and belief is respected, we believe all publicly funded schools should be fully inclusive and equally welcoming to children of all religion and belief backgrounds.

Secular holidays

Some Humanists celebrate official religion-based public holidays, such as Christmas or Easter, but as secular holidays rather than religious ones.

Many Humanists also celebrate the winter and summer solstice, the former of which (in the northern hemisphere) is the root of the celebration of Christmas, and the equinoxes, of which the vernal equinox is associated with Christianity’s Easter and indeed with all other springtime festivals of renewal, and the autumnal equinox which is related to such celebrations such as Halloween and All Souls’ Day.

Let Us Be Bats

The National Bat Monitoring Programme surveys are carefully designed so that anybody can take part in monitoring these fascinating but easily overlooked mammals. As well as being of great value to bat conservation, the surveys are fun and rewarding to carry out.

They usually involve visiting a roost or potential foraging site on two evenings in the summer. We run different surveys which cater to different levels of experience and knowledge.

Natural selectionis the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences inphenotype; it is a key mechanism ofevolution. The term “natural selection” was popularised byCharles Darwin, who intended it to be compared with artificial selection, now more commonly referred to asselective breeding.

Variationexists within allpopulationsoforganisms. This occurs partly because randommutationsarise in thegenomeof an individual organism, and these mutations can be passed tooffspring. Throughout the individuals’ lives, their genomes interact with their environments to cause variations intraits. (The environment of a genome includes the molecular biology in thecell, other cells, other individuals, populations,species, as well as the abiotic environment.) Individuals with certain variants of the trait may survive and reproduce more than individuals with other, less successful, variants. Therefore, the population evolves. Factors that affect reproductive success are also important, an issue that Darwin developed in his ideas onsexual selection, which was redefined as being included in natural selection in the 1930s when biologists considered it not to be very important,andfecundity selection, for example.

Natural selection acts on the phenotype, or the observable characteristics of an organism, but thegenetic(heritable) basis of any phenotype that gives a reproductive advantage may become more common in a population (seeallele frequency). Over time, this process can result in populations that specialise for particularecological niches(microevolution) and may eventually result in the emergence of new species(macroevolution). In other words, natural selection is an important process (though not the only process) by which evolution takes place within a population of organisms. Natural selection can be contrasted with artificial selection, in which humansintentionally choose specific traits (although they may not always get what they want). In natural selection there is no intentional choice. In other words, artificial selection isteleologicaland natural selection is not teleological.

……………is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known as heritability of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance). It is named after the French biologistJean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories as a supplement to his concept of an inherent progressive tendency driving organisms continuously towards greater complexity, in parallel but separate lineages with no extinction. Lamarck did not originate the idea of soft inheritance, which proposes that individual efforts during the lifetime of the organisms were the main mechanism driving species to adaptation, as they supposedly would acquire adaptive changes and pass them on to offspring.